The Key Missing Leadership Ingredient: Part 2 -- The Military

Real leadership is about transforming the system, not just succeeding within or despite the system. Today, we know how to run organizations in ways that that lift up the human spirit, both for those doing the work and those for whom the work is done. So why don’t we get on with it?

Some readers have written in reply to my article last week on The Key Missing Ingredient of Leadership Today, that we need “new mental models”, models that embrace the tensions between discipline and freedom, management and leadership, and nurtures the possibilities for growth and creativity in the space between them.

The good news is that we don’t need to wait for those models to be invented. They already exist.

In the case of the military, we have obtained an advance draft of a statement from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The statement has been developed as a result of their re-discovering the key missing ingredient of real leadership. They have set about transforming the military system, rather than merely working within it or despite it.*

A draft statement from the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Let us begin with a confession. We have spent too much of our time advising our young soldiers about how to become leaders within the military bureaucracy. We have not spent enough time reflecting on how we should be leaders ourselves.

We have spent too much time advising our aspiring young leaders to learn how to jump through hoops, without realizing we have been training them to be skilled bureaucrats rather than innovative warriors who actually enhance national security.

Accordingly we have recently been examining how we can lead the entire military establishment with the same agility that we exhibit on the battlefield. Today we want to share with you the results of our deliberations.

We have decided to do things differently. Fortunately we have a lot of success to build on.

The shift to mission command

Over the last decade, we have shown how to manage our battle forces with mission command. This involved a recognition that warfare is probabilistic and unpredictable, with large elements of disorder and uncertainty. We have learned how to cope with that disorder and uncertainty through decentralization, spontaneity, informality, loose rein, self-discipline and initiative. This has resulted in acceptable decisions made faster. We have drawn on ability from all echelons, with communications characterized by interaction both vertical and horizontal, rather than one-way and top-down. This way of managing is described in detail in the US Army’s excellent manual, Mission Command (2003). What successes we have had in warfare over the last decade have flowed from embracing these tenets.

The military remains a hierarchical bureaucracy

Unfortunately, the re-imagining of the military has largely been limited to the battlefield. Outside the battlefield, we are still grounded in an obsolete bureaucracy that is preoccupied with protecting turf and resources. It is hostile to precisely the kind of institutional innovation that society so desperately needs from us today. Outside the battlefield, we are still embedded in the world of “detailed command”, governed by the assumptions of a deterministic, predictable world and focused on centralization, coercion, formality, tight rein, imposed discipline and obedience.

Yet the world outside the battlefield has also become probabilistic and unpredictable, with large elements of disorder and uncertainty. The economy can no longer afford an ever growing military budget. Along with the growth in health care spending, growth in defense spending is one of the principal causes the alarming U.S. budget deficit.

We are in an era where the emphasis has shifted from a willingness to “pay any price” for anything with a “Defense” label, to a more penetrating consideration of value for money. Increasingly, each defense expenditure is examined with scrutiny as to what if any contribution it will make to any actual security threat and whether any added security is warranted by the cost.

At the same time, the size and nature of future conflicts are unpredictable, with the decisive weapons as likely to be bits and bytes as bullets. In this regard, the contrast between the military operations in Afghanistan while the head of Al-Quaeda was living comfortably in a suburb of Pakistan’s capital is instructive. Security will have little to do with massive invasions by large armies and more often ones where success depends on a combination of intelligence, courageous decision making and a tiny group of high-performing operatives to get the job done.

Just as we have learned how to cope with disorder and uncertainty on the battlefield through decentralization, spontaneity, informality, loose rein, self-discipline and initiative, so similar lessons must be absorbed by the military as a whole. This will lead to better decisions made faster, drawing on the ability from all echelons, with communications characterized by interaction, both vertical and horizontal, rather than, as now, one-way and top-down. It will reflect the fact that the wisdom of a few people at the top of the organization is much less powerful than the wisdom of our entire forces.

A Defense budget based on actual threats

Now it is time to take the next step and extend mission command from the battlefield to the military establishment as a whole. Let us start with defense spending which is large ($685 billion a year, and growing fast).

Our analysis confirms the finding in Barron’s that a budget at the level of expenditure that we had in 2000 would still be much larger than the highest estimates for the combined current military spending of any country or group that realistically could be America’s enemy, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and al Qaeda. Even that calculation assumes that all these forces would be united against America in a future conflict.

This analysis also tends to show that our efforts to defend the high levels of expenditure have largely been based, not on any rational case of actual or imagined enemies that the US would have to fight, but on entitlement.

Thus in 2007, our Chairman called four percent of GDP an “absolute floor” for military spending growth. On this kind of reasoning, if the US GDP goes up by 20 percent, defense spending would go up by a minimum of 20 percent, even if the actual threats represented by real enemies declines. In other words, defense spending was unrelated to actual defense. Whatever sense this kind of reasoning made in 2007, it makes no sense today. The American people deserve better. Accordingly our budget requests in future will be based on the analysis of actual threats represented by real enemies.

We have considered and rejected the argument by Republican historian, Robert Kagan, that defense spending must be maintained to convince our allies that America is not in decline. He wrote: “The announcement of a defense cutback would be taken by the world as evidence that the American retreat has begun.” Again, such an argument has nothing to do with actual defense against actual enemies: it would turn our budget into an elaborate public relations exercise. It would mean that we wouldn’t have a Department of Defense. It would have become a Department of “Defense”.

In the light of actual threats from real or possible enemies, we see no difficulty in accepting the recommendations of the Center for Defense Information, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization founded by Winslow T. Wheeler. This amounts to a proposal of a $1.6 trillion 10-year cut which would reduce US Base Military Spending to its inflation-adjusted 2000 level. We note also that the journal, Barron’s, supports such a shift.

Beyond a parade ground military

Base Military Spending,which amounted to $550 billion, did not include allocations for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As one analyst has noted, this includes what the military requires “to sustain it in garrison and have the Blue Angels perform the requisite number of air shows during a year. Should we ask it to do anything, even merely adjust its normal deployment schedules to sail down to Haiti and deliver supplies, that costs a billion or two extra. Actual wars, needless to say, cost hundreds of billions extra. Imagine a fire department that charges residents a premium every time its fire engines leave the station house, and you have understood the U.S. military.”

We believe that the American people deserve better. In future, all military expenditure will be included in a single budget, with provisions to cater for unexpected contingencies.

Establishing accountability

Like all government agencies and public corporations, the Pentagon is legally required to submit to a yearly audit that connects its spending to its allocations. We were surprised to find in our review that despite the law and the Constitution (Article I, Section 9), the Pentagon has never been formally audited.

We agree with the findings of The Pentagon Labyrinth, written by knowledgeable military men, namely, the lack of audits means that we cannot track the money we spend. We do not really know if we have paid contractors once, twice, or not at all. We do not even know how many contractors we have, how many they employ, or what they are doing.

Given this de facto license to operate without financial accountability, we have ended up requisitioning ever more complex weapons that cost many times more to buy and operate than those being replaced. This complexity actually makes our troops less effective. We have come to see that its aim is to justify ever-rising bills from the contractors, not to give our Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force an edge. The overriding need, then, is to establish regular audit procedures to find out how we do spend taxpayers’ money.

It seems quite probable that the audit will show that much of our military budget concerns weapons systems that have no justification from any threat we are likely to face.

We are at a loss to explain to why, at a time of great financial stress, with the U.S.S.R. gone, the U.S. is still spending $6.8 billion a year to keep troops in Germany. And a combined $8.2 billion annually to station troops in Japan, Italy and the U.K.

Few benefits go to front line troops

This budget largesse might make some sense if it were bestowed on the courageous fighting men and women who are risking their lives on the front lines. The reality is that most of benefits are used to prop up the profits of defense contractors far from any front lines, often working on systems that will never be completed or built, let alone ever deployed.

In other words, the “Defense” budget is a giant subsidy or bubble benefiting firms that don’t have to worry too much about global competition. If by accident a foreign firm wins a major contract, politicians have been mobilized to reverse the decision and bring home the bacon, as when Chicago-based Boeing bested European Airbus to build a fleet of 179 aerial refueling tankers at a cost of $35 billion.

The “Defense” budget is held in place because contractors have deliberately placed their facilities in multiple states and congressional districts, so that if there is any risk of the “Defense” budget being cut, the relevant representatives in Congress rise up in protest to cuts in spending in their district, regardless of the spending’s relevance to actual defense. Once again, we are dealing with “Defense” spending, not spending to protect the nation’s actual defense.

Training our leaders

Our system of training must also change. We have come to see that we have been breeding a generation of leaders who are brilliant at acing their tests, where the tests measure to capacity to solve problems within a given set of assumptions. Instead, we must create new tests that measure initiative, creativity, collaboration and an ability to think differently so that we have the leaders that we need for the future, rather than leaders who are good at mastering the intricacies of today’s hierarchical bureaucracy. The tests must be ones which are coherent and credible to those taking the tests so that they themselves can verify whether they are making progress, not simply whether they can persuade some examiner to give them a good grade.

The need for a systemic solutions

These problems are systemic and deeply rooted. We realize that we must transform the system, following Albert Einstein’s advice: ‘The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.’”

Spending on “Defense” is currently held in place by an interlocking set of attitudes and practices of the military, the politicians and the defense contractors. It has seemed impervious to any possible questioning. While not being very efficient in defending against actual enemies, we have been very effective at defending our own funding. We are living within a bubble of self-perpetuating hierarchical bureaucracy. We believe that we can and need to do better.

We have decided to exercise real leadership and break these attitudes and practices. We have decided to transform the military system so that it becomes focused on real defense of our great nation, rather than propping up a set of entitlements that are actually getting in the way of establishing real security as well as bankrupting our country.

We recognize that no single measure or action will change the current situation. Instead, we need to exemplify a radical change in the way we think, speak and act about defense and security. We must set aside the assumption that anything labeled as defense necessarily has anything to do with actual defense, as opposed to “Defense”. We have begun the hard work of this radical rethinking: who our enemies are, what kind of threats we really face and what kind of actions are necessary to defend against them.

None of this will be easy. But we are ready for the task. We have been a country that could get difficult things done, like landing a man on the moon in less than a decade. The killing of Osama bin Laden shows that we haven’t entirely lost this ability. We want to make great accomplishment the rule, not the exception. We call on your support as we carry out this great task.